ArticlePsychological science2018
Extraordinary Altruists Exhibit Enhanced Self-Other Overlap in Neural Responses to Distress.
Article in Psychological science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Can ketamine and other glutamate receptor modulators be considered entactogens?Psychiatry research · 2025Pooled it
- A feature-based network analysis and fMRI meta-analysis reveal three distinct types of prosocial decisions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- P300-mediated modulations in self-other processing under psychedelic psilocybin are related to connectedness and changed meaning: A window into the self-other overlap.Human brain mapping · 2020Trial
- Choosing Not to Eat Meat: What Characterizes Independently Vegetarian Children?Developmental science · 2026Article
- Article
- Delaying rewards reduces egoism bias during prosocial acts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Beyond the home: how pet ownership drives stray animal rescue willingness through empathy and moral obligation.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Helping people, neglecting soil: contrasting effects of emotional empathy with humans on altruistic behaviour and soil conservation in a population of Chilean farmers.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Close relationship partners of impartial altruists do not report diminished relationship quality and are similarly altruistic.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Unselfish traits and social decision-making patterns characterize six populations of real-world extraordinary altruists.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Enemy or friend: the personal and the factual patient-physician relationship.Frontiers in medicine · 2023Article
- Social affiliation is sufficient to provoke the partner-advantage.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Placebo Analgesia Reduces Costly Prosocial Helping to Lower Another Person's Pain.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Cognitive effort for self, strangers, and charities.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Modeling Variation in Empathic Sensitivity Using Go/No-Go Social Reinforcement Learning.Affective science · 2022Article
- The bright and dark sides of egoism.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
- Reduced Multivoxel Pattern Similarity of Vicarious Neural Pain Responses in Psychopathy.Journal of personality disorders · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Shared neural representations during experienced and observed distress are hypothesized to reflect empathic neural simulation, which may support altruism. But the correspondence between real-world altruism and shared neural representations has not been directly tested, and empathy's role in promoting altruism toward strangers has been questioned. Here, we show that individuals who have performed costly altruism (donating a kidney to a stranger; n = 25) exhibit greater self-other overlap than matched control participants ( n = 27) in neural representations of pain and threat (fearful anticipation) in anterior insula (AI) during an empathic-pain paradigm. Altruists exhibited greater self-other correspondence in pain-related activation in left AI, highlighting that group-level overlap was supported by individual-level associations between empathic pain and firsthand pain. Altruists exhibited enhanced functional coupling of left AI with left midinsula during empathic pain and threat. Results show that heightened neural instantiations of empathy correspond to real-world altruism and highlight limitations of self-report.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.